Word: softe
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Veils. This is a play about twin sisters. One of them began her career in a convent and then, troubled and restless, sought the world. The other, a criminal woman, deserted the world after an erratic career and became entirely lulled by the soft silences of the nunnery. The play veered from beautiful and sensitive writing to a moral gibberish which can best be described as nunsense. The allegorical value of its eleven episodic scenes was of no great consequence. One or two of them, notably those which attempted to reproduce the atmosphere of a Catholic retreat, were thoroughly effective...
...their fifers play gay tunes in the expectation of disaster. A sputter of rockets goes up, at night, for a last and tragic parade. Confused, threatening, alive, these sounds sift into the shadowed room which is the stage; a room in which there has been caught, by some soft and secret charm of writing, by the clever playing of Mary Ellis and Basil Sydney, the intimate mystery of the past...
...failure of the rebellion was the beginning of a tragic and surprising war; battles were fought under the smoky sky, fugitives hid in the soft stillness of the mountains. A succession of dark generals led their ebony soldiers to cruel and bewildering victories. Ugly Toussaint, who beat a Napoleonic army, was captured and sent far away to die. Clumsy Jean Jaques Dessalines made himself emperor of the black island and imported two ballet masters to teach him how to dance; before he had time to learn, a soldier murdered him. Henry Christophe, the billiard marker, during all this time...
...prologue and epilogue to the play take place in the present, and present some excellent dancing, and a general tempo which in most ways suit the taste of the average musical comedy public better than the swinging, soft atmosphere of the body of the play. Nevertheless, the music throughout it distinctly tuneful, and considerably above the average of the usual offerings. On the whole, by no means an exciting evening, but a pleasant one. In spite of the camouflaging effects of crinolines, the chorus established itself as one of the most restful the eye could demand...
...flies her love-nest-Ruggiero, and for comic relief-a maid, a poet. Unlike Camille & Sappho the comic relief wins out, Ruggiero's intentions prove a little too honorable-and the swallow flies back home. Unlike the earlier Puccini scores, the element of tragedy is missing from the soft, curving arias and duets. Unlike Monte Carlo, the whole was almost reclaimed last week in Manhattan by the altogether pleasant production at the Metropolitan-by the gay, graceful Magda of Lucrezia Bori, by the caricatured poet of Armand Tokatyan, the brilliant Second Empire settings of Joseph Urban. Only Beniamino Gigli...